This is the ninth year that I have blogged about my BSFA votes, though I haven't consistently noted my choices in this category (I did so for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2016). This year we have one monograph, two essays and two series of blog posts, leading to the usual problems of comparing apples, oranges and mangoes. I think I have to take ( Read more... )

In contrast to the Best Novel category, I found this a pretty easy selection to rank.

With no hesitation, my top vote goes to The Enclave, by Anne Charnock. Second paragraph of third chapter: Zach chips in with a single question: did I see any stalls selling figs? I’m not surprised by his question. He told me one time that his family had fig ( Read more... )

I've been blogging my reaction to the BSFA shortlists for about a decade now, and this is the first time I can remember feeling that all the shortlisted novels were books I would like to see winning - it's been a very difficult choice. Also worth noting that this is the first time ever that the shortlist for Best Novel does not include a single ( Read more... )

I may not know much about art, but I know what I like; and I found it fairly easy to rank the six shortlisted artworks for this year’s BSFA Awards. My top three and bottom two were all very close, though.


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The BSFA Award final ballot is now out!

The 48 novels on the long-list have been winnowed down to four, two of which were in the top ten in the previous table and two of which were in the lower half. (To be precise, they ranked 3rd, 9th, 27th and 35th out of 48; last year’s shortlist similarly ranked 9th, 23rd, 26th, 28th and 29th out of 34.) ( Read more... )

The BSFA Award long lists are out!

This is the third year of the three-stage process, similar to the one which was rejected ( as I hoped it would be) by WSFS for the Hugos at last year’s Worldcon. It works better for the BSFA. First, because there are far fewer categories - only four, compared to 18 for last year’s Hugos (and 19 for this year’s) - ( Read more... )